Have you ever argued with an author, or wrestled with a book? Has an idea ever so overwhelmed you that you gasped audibly and threw the book down in either disgust or delight? Have you ever returned to a section,  re-reading a sentence over and over hoping to find some other way to interpret it? Have you ever, like Jacob, wrestled with a book and walked away forever changed and limping?

I spent about a decade of my life trying to describe and understand my own encounter with a book and author and ideas on a page that completely transformed my entire outlook and direction in life. I’ve written more on that momentary experience than any other thing (and still haven’t been able to aptly describe or understand what took place).

Like the image above, when I was a college student seeking meaning and direction, I placed my entire life within the Bible’s pages and left myself completely at its mercy. Instead of closing down upon me and being crushed by it, I found myself instead liberated into a new and exciting life of faith. Wrapped up inside its pages I found myself  “entering the very gates of heaven itself” to quote Luther.

When I went digging around in the library stacks of Bethel Seminary in San Diego in the fall of 2002 to begin researching what might have happened to me in my life-changing encounter with the Book, I didn’t find a quick or clear explanation.  But I did meet some other well-known Christians who had had similar encounters with the Book. In my very first seminary essay, I mentioned some of my esteemed company, asking:

How do we make sense of or describe such enigmatic phenomena as “hearts burning” from hearing the Old Testament story (Luke 24:32), a “heart strangely warmed” as with John Wesley, or having one’s “heart filled with a light of confidence and all the shadows of doubt” being forever “swept away” as with Augustine through his reading of Romans? These are not issues relevant only to gray-bearded, ivory tower buffs.  We are dealing with the everyday miracle of lives being radically transformed through a mysterious encounter with the Word of God! 

Christians of all people should be able to grasp this idea quicker than the rest since at the heart of our faith is a God who insists on letting his Word become flesh in order to pursue and pester us with irresistible love and grace. Jacob wrestled with Israel (Jacob’s new name) long ago in the dark desert, and ever since sons and daughters of Israel  have found themselves wrestling with Israel’s greatest Son, Jesus.

One of those sons who knew the desolation of that dark desert place where demons lurk and one’s conscience is the greatest enemy, is Martin Luther. History has preserved his precise moment of wrestling when, like Jacob’s hip, Luther’s theology was jerked out of socket — a moment that forever changed his understanding of God and left him both jubilant and limping.

Luther knew the experience of reading by candlelight, pouring over a book, and didn’t hold back cursing at and voicing his frustrations with the Author. We see vividly in Luther the power of re-reading, and letting the Holy Spirit illuminate a familiar text in a way that forever changes one’s life — and in this case, the history of Western Christianity!

On the eve of the 500th Anniversary of the Reformation, let’s eaves drop on this sacred bout with the book by reading the account of Luther’s so-called “Tower Experience” of 1519. Pay close attention to the active and passionate way he engages with the Bible.

He’s not reading the words; he’s encountering the Word himself!

Before you read it, let me offer this personal word: If someone were to ask me why my faith seems (at times) so alive in a world so full of lukewarm spirituality and casual church-goers, I believe its largely due to the fact that I choose to approach the Bible as though the words are truly Divine, “living and active, sharper than a two-edged sword” (Heb. 4:12), while for others its just dried ink on paper. I have tried to engage and wrestle with the Book, while many have just read it. I’ve walked away limping (more than once), while others merely walk away ‘enlightened’. I’m not boasting, for all this is God’s grace to me; but I think that moment (in college) when I really surrendered my life to the Word (rather than standing over it and merely studying it) has been a foundational key to ongoing vibrant faith. 

[Here’s another piece on this approach to reading the Bible.]

Now, to Luther’s wrestling match with God in Romans:

Meanwhile in that same year, 1519, I had begun interpreting the Psalms once again. I felt confident that I was now more experienced, since I had dealt in university courses with St. Paul’s Letters to the Romans, to the Galatians, and the Letter to the Hebrews. I had conceived a burning desire to understand what Paul meant in his Letter to the Romans, but thus far there had stood in my way, not the cold blood around my heart, but that one word which is in chapter one: “The justice of God is revealed in it.” I hated that word, “justice of God,” which, by the use and custom of all my teachers, I had been taught to understand philosophically as referring to formal or active justice, as they call it, i.e., that justice by which God is just and by which he punishes sinners and the unjust.

But I, blameless monk that I was, felt that before God I was a sinner with an extremely troubled conscience. I couldn’t be sure that God was appeased by my satisfaction. I did not love, no, rather I hated the just God who punishes sinners. In silence, if I did not blaspheme, then certainly I grumbled vehemently and got angry at God. I said, “Isn’t it enough that we miserable sinners, lost for all eternity because of original sin, are oppressed by every kind of calamity through the Ten Commandments? Why does God heap sorrow upon sorrow through the Gospel and through the Gospel threaten us with his justice and his wrath?” This was how I was raging with wild and disturbed conscience. I constantly badgered St. Paul about that spot in Romans 1 and anxiously wanted to know what he meant.

I meditated night and day on those words until at last, by the mercy of God, I paid attention to their context: “The justice of God is revealed in it, as it is written: ‘The just person lives by faith.'” I began to understand that in this verse the justice of God is that by which the just person lives by a gift of God, that is by faith. I began to understand that this verse means that the justice of God is revealed through the Gospel, but it is a passive justice, i.e. that by which the merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written: “The just person lives by faith.” All at once I felt that I had been born again and entered into paradise itself through open gates. Immediately I saw the whole of Scripture in a different light. I ran through the Scriptures from memory and found that other terms had analogous meanings, e.g., the work of God, that is, what God works in us; the power of God, by which he makes us powerful; the wisdom of God, by which he makes us wise; the strength of God, the salvation of God, the glory of God.

I exalted this sweetest word of mine, “the justice of God,” with as much love as before I had hated it with hate. This phrase of Paul was for me the very gate of paradise. Afterward I read Augustine’s “On the Spirit and the Letter,” in which I found what I had not dared hope for. I discovered that he too interpreted “the justice of God” in a similar way, namely, as that with which God clothes us when he justifies us. Although Augustine had said it imperfectly and did not explain in detail how God imputes justice to us, still it pleased me that he taught the justice of God by which we are justified.

-An Excerpt From Preface to the Complete Edition of Luther’s Latin Works (1545) by Martin Luther, 1483-1546